We Need a ‘Stewardship Economy.’ Habitat Restoration is the First Step

With the support of VertueLab, I’m examining what a carbon-free economy would look like. This is Part 4 in the series.

Part 1: Transportation
Part 2: Power
Part 3: The Built Environment
Part 4: Restoration

Before he was in the business of revitalizing Oregon timber towns, Nils Christoffersen was more concerned with rhinos and elephants. Through much of the 1990s, Christoffersen bounced around southern Africa, working with government entities, nonprofits, and rural communities to manage natural resources without decimating the local wildlife. The goal was to improve economic standing while embracing conservation — preserving rhino habitat couldn’t mean a family loses their livelihood.

In 1999, Christoffersen moved to Wallowa County, a remote outpost in northeast Oregon, to work for a nonprofit called Wallowa Resources. When he and his family arrived, “this was a place that was struggling,” he told me. “Wallowa County had amongst the highest unemployment rates in the state of Oregon at the time. It was struggling from the loss of its mills, its largest job provider, and some of its higher-paying jobs.” Those job losses had ripple effects. Cafes and bars where sawyers and mill workers gathered dried up. Families left town in search of work, so enrollment in local school districts fell. In this part of the country, a slowdown in the woods could cost a teacher his job.

All this was taking place during the “timber wars” of the 1990s. Some in Wallowa County blamed environmentalists for their plight, going so far as to burn some local ones in effigy. But a group of folks in the nonprofit, government, and private sectors adopted a different outlook. They saw the writing on the wall: public values and the wood products market were changing. The U.S. Forest Service had drastically reduced timber sales on federal land, virtually ending the logging of old-growth forests that held the biggest and most profitable trees. What trees were cut — including those on private land unaffected by Forest Service policy — were skinnier and, thus, less profitable.

Recognizing a new path was needed, this group founded Wallowa Resources in 1996. Since its inception, the organization has kickstarted the restoration of streambeds and overgrown forests, spun off a company that specializes in small-diameter timber products, helped ranchers control invasive species, installed renewable energy sources around the Wallowa Valley, took over management of public campsites slated for closure, and initiated a slew of education programs that connect youth with the landscape around them. All these are part of what Christoffersen, now the group’s executive director, calls the “stewardship economy,” a restoration- and stewardship-based approach to natural resource management that could be a model for economic revitalization in the era of climate change. 

“We’re interested in balancing the land’s ability to produce high-quality food, renewable wood products, renewable energy, but also the environmental services that we all depend on,” he said. “That’s not going to happen unless somebody is taking care of that land. … There’s an opportunity, hopefully, to build purpose and value again that’s connected to place.”

By restoring degraded lands, we can restore communities — urban and rural alike — in need of an economic lift, all while bolstering the environmental resilience necessary to stem off the worst impacts of climate change. Such a system would represent a fundamental shift in Western land use. Instead of the grab-and-run extraction of the previous century, Western communities have a chance to build economies based on long-term stewardship of healthy ecosystems.

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It’s a bit perverse, but the extraction economy of previous generations has cued up decades’ worth of restoration projects for current and future natural resources workers. Climate change, fire suppression, and ill-guided timber harvests means that up to 82 million acres of federal forests —  42 percent of the Forest Service’s portfolio — are in need of restoration, and that total skyrockets upward if you include private forests. More than half of U.S. wetlands have been drained; California has lost more than 90 percent of its marshes. Thousands of abandoned mines across the West need to be cleaned up, and there are an estimated 2 million abandoned oil and gas wells that could use a plug. 

While those stats may be a greatest-hits list of our ecological malfeasance, they also represent a potential transition to a stewardship economy. These issues must be addressed if we are to preserve a worthwhile place to live as climate change unfolds. Well-functioning ecosystems store water, keep virus-carrying wildlife from straying into cities, mitigate temperature increases, and provide a host of benefits that will only become more important as the planet warms and our climate becomes disastrously wacky.

Fixing these problems, at least in the short term, means jobs and money, often in communities that were left in the dust by rapacious extraction. Relatively little is known about the economic implications of restoration work (shocker: we’ve done very little restoration work as a country), but analyses of government projects have some positive takeaways. 

One such study, conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey, looked at the economic impact of select restoration projects undertaken by the Bureau of Land Management and the Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration Program, a federal agency that shows up in the wake of events like wildfires. While results varied by project, the USGS economists estimated that every $1 million invested in restoration work yielded $2.2 million to $3.4 million in total economic output, which ranges from workers’ income to the money they spend at the nearest gas station. 

“I was surprised by what a complex mosaic the restoration economy is,” USGS economist Cathy Cullinane Thomas, who was part of the survey, told me. “All these restoration projects have so many people coming together to make them happen … and people are really creative in this field.”

Take the restoration of Utah’s sagebrush steppe, which has over the years suffered from overgrazing, wildfires, and the incursion of juniper trees — much to the detriment of species like the imperilled greater sage-grouse. These projects are overseen by the state’s Watershed Restoration Initiative, a coalition of local, state, federal, and private entities that has spent nearly $280 million to treat 1.98 million acres of Utah habitat. 

Rehabbing a sagebrush landscape requires the expertise of many. “Contract workers come from both the private and public sector,” David Hercher, spokesman for the BLM’s Paria River District, said in an email. “They include archaeologists, hand thinning companies, mechanic mulching companies, wildlife survey companies, and even aviation companies.” Meanwhile, BLM biologists, archaeologists, geospatial information specialists, and administrators work alongside contractors on each project.

No single restoration project can reshape an area’s economy, but Cullinane Thomas’ case studies hint at the potential of a concerted effort to methodically treat the West’s damaged landscapes. Just consider seeds: one prairie restoration project in Minnesota, she said, spawned four purveyors of native seed. Meanwhile, a skilled pilot could spend her autumn flying across the West, dropping sagebrush and bluebunch wheatgrass seed across remediated sites.

And then there are the ecosystem benefits — those hard-to-quantify outputs that are the end goal of any restoration project. Some highlights from Cullinane Thomas’ review: Restoration along the upper Arkansas River, in Colorado, improved water quality and left locals with a state-designated Gold Medal trout stream. Sagebrush steppe work in Utah and Idaho mitigated the risk of wildfire and improved habitat for mule deer. Fuels reduction lessened the risk of fires outside Pioche, Nevada, and in Arizona’s Zuni Mountains. And, after fires devastated Oregon rangeland in 2012, restoration work left locals with a functioning ecosystem instead of a weed-choked moonscape.

And don’t think restoration is just a rural opportunity. Most of our cities, for example, are lined with creeks, though you wouldn’t know it — Americans had a knack for paving over them. (Oh, the things we do for cars.) Thus, thousands of ecologically valuable waterways are ensconced in concrete and culverts, rushing beneath an unknowing population that could really use the clean air, cooler temperatures, and exposure to nature a babbling brook provides.

But, across the region, people are digging them up. Stretches of Codornices, Strawberry, and Blackberry creeks have all been exposed in Berkeley, California. Seattle’s Northgate Mall is rimmed by Thornton Creek, which for years hid beneath parking lots and other developments. Napa, California — whose downtown was routinely flooded during deluges — decided to restore its namesake river’s wetlands and streambeds; the city now has one of the most effective flood management systems in the West. And in Salt Lake City, once-hidden sections of Red Butte, Emigration, and Parley’s creeks have been exposed to create Three Creeks Confluence Park, where they connect with the Jordan River. Further, the park is in the city’s west side, long an area more associated with pollution than waterways and birdsong.

These aren’t mere aesthetic projects. “There’s so much that you can do with a daylighting project,” Brian Tonetti, executive director of the Seven Canyons Trust, an organization whose mission is to daylight Salt Lake City’s creeks, told The Salt Lake Tribune. “From improving water quality, providing recreational opportunities … [to] increased economic development around these projects, creating more livable cities.”

In Northeast Oregon, Wallowa Resources is making its namesake valley a more livable place by functioning as a sort of restoration research and development hub. “Fundamental to the stewardship economy is the notion that the people and the natural resources of a place are its most important assets,” Christoffersen said. “It’s about putting the people and the natural resources back to work, but with a more holistic and integrated vision. It’s not just production of commodities — it’s producing high-quality products and maintaining ecological function and environmental services.”

Misguided use of natural resources — be they living trees or fossilized ones — got us into the mess of climate change. Restoration projects can correct the trajectory, and lead the West to a stewardship economy in which community and ecological well-being are no longer at odds.

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